Legerdemain
by Nocturnal Smile
Summary: Elizabeth does not make a happy drunk, but then again, she doesn’t really have a reason to be happy. CielxSebastian, through her eyes.


A/N: Inspired by Streetcar Named Desire and Novocain, but mostly Novocain. Go read her stuff, it will blow your mind.

This is not a happy story, and since Elizabeth is older in my story, her personality is going to be a little different as well. Ignores whatever happened at the end of the anime, and you should know that Elizabeth and Ciel are already married. There is **yaoi** in some of her memories. You've been warned.

Enjoy!

* * *

"Things you lose don't just disappear into thin air. Someone takes them."  
-Setona Mizushiro

* * *

Elizabeth laughed into her glass of wine. It was not the sort of laugh she would have let out as a child when everything sparkled and eagerly took on the colors she gave it, this was a laugh like leaves too dead to cling to their branches falling underfoot and breaking, brittle, inebriated with autumn's chill and slickness and rotting orange sunsets. This was a laugh, she mused as she refilled her glass, whose only appropriate audience could be an empty room and all these lovely bottles filled only with moonlight.

What luck then, that she was in a room all by herself, left with only wine bottles for company!

She gulped the wine down and relished the fact that she acting as much like a lady as her dear husband Ciel was acting like a noble. She did not notice when wine spilled out of the downturned corners of her mouth, trickling down her chin to drip on her collar as if she was hemorrhaging or biting her tongue too hard.

The wine made her head swim, and she wasn't sure if she was laughing or crying or slurring her rage at the deaf walls.

Is this what happened when your dreams were achieved? Because that's what this was, wasn't it? Her dream?

She was married to Ciel, and he was happy. What more could she ask for?

The walls did not answer her. Bugger them, then.

Wine was not enough, and she wished she knew where to find stronger stuff, but she had never ventured outside the house and into the alleyways her husband knew so well; their worlds remained apart. She just hadn't realized how far apart they were until…

Until she had realized that while Ciel was happy, it wasn't her that made him happy. She really was a blonde. She had never been able to do anything for the one she loved, and had always been a burden.

Now, she was useful. She was a cover. A mask, something that sits on the skin but does not go any deeper, something the world can see so that it does not feel the need to look further. Sleight of hand, magic, look at me smiling, smiling with bouncy blonde hair look at my dimples sparkle look at my arms my milky white arms and kissable wrists because they're wrapped around Lord Phantomhive's arm and don't look at his eyes because because

they're not on me.

They're on Sebastian.

Wasn't it funny?

When she was a child Lizzie dressed Sebastian up in women's bonnets because she thought it was cute and he had let her. Lizzie was young so she thought it was because he loved being cute as much as she did, and as she grew up and learned about the hierarchy she thought it was because she was of a higher status that he obeyed.

Who could have guessed it was because he liked playing the part of a woman? (She tried to smile, but it felt crooked. Elizabeth worried it was going to fall and splatter on the floor like a piece of meat still pink inside and not cooked all the way through.)

She knew now. She knew that Ciel would smile, smile while Sebastian laid out beneath him panting, they were both panting, and their arms were fervently moving all over as if trying to steal each other's skin and the pink she loved as a girl and the pink she once covered Ciel's mansion in was staining both their cheeks all the way down to their chests and then their _lipsteethtongue_ mashed together desperately, slurping and leaving trails of bruises. Love bites. Ciel had never acted like that when they made love; he had led her to believe making love was gentle and slow.

She had not known making love could be screams and begging _oh please stop don't stop I'll burst_ and passion and _I love yous _without fanfare or show, just honest and wide-eyed and smiles shy as children- she hadn't known. She should have known. And Sebastian was the one who knew how to draw it out of Ciel, not her, and she had never known jealousy like this. It was acrid and worse tasting then the wine, like bile and the stench of the dead beached whale she and Ciel had seen when they walked on the seashore they had stayed on for their honeymoon. She had cried for it but Ciel had told her as if he were speaking to himself that even if it died it had still crawled out of the murk and into the sunshine.

She hadn't understood.

None of this was the reason she was drinking.

She was drinking because she loved Ciel. She was drinking because she could not have his love in return. She was drinking because he loved Sebastian. She was drinking because Sebastian had seen her eyes past the crack between the door and its frame, and had smiled at her as her husband thrust into him, beautiful back muscles flexing and marred by scars.

Elizabeth was drinking because she loved Ciel, and because she now knew what it meant to love him.

Loving him did not mean he would announce to the world his love for her in air perfumed by jasmine and night flowers as bursts of fireworks exploded in the shape of her name, it did not mean she could take Bard's flamethrower and burn them both in

(her and Ciel's marriage)

bed where they were copulating, though she had thought of it. But that would mean they would both die together and she would still end up alone.

Elizabeth would not kill herself.

She let out another bitter laugh and threw the glass against the wall because she wanted to break something because maybe everything was breaking, or maybe it was just her breaking or just her heart, which to her was the same thing. She lifted the bottle by the neck and drank straight out of it, and somehow the wine was more satisfying taken like that.

Since she loved Ciel, she could not change anything. Sebastian made him happy, but if everyone else knew he would lose everything. Sodomy was not looked well upon. So he needed a cover, and for the first time in her life, Elizabeth was not a burden to be borne. But God and the Queen, why this?

Elizabeth was the only one capable of hiding this and all suspicion of it from the outside world with her role as the loving and much loved wife.

And that's why Sebastian was smiling.

He knew she couldn't do anything to stop this.

The wine bottle was empty, and Elizabeth couldn't really bring herself to care. She would have a monstrous headache in the morning and would probably spend her time huddled around a bowl waiting for her insides to see the outside world, and she would be waiting to see her insides come out to see the outside world so she could confirm they still existed because for now her head was moving as if whales were kicking up tidal waves trying to crawl on shore and her body felt as empty as her wine bottles.

When Lizzie was little, she put glitter on things to make them beautiful, stars on people and places that were too small and insignificant to matter anywhere as much as the sky that housed the constellations, and she put hearts on the things that didn't have any. Every addition was a tiny wish for this person or this item or this place to become better than they were through a little piece of her beauty, and now she wants everything she gave out back because she needs it more than they do now and she saved nothing of those wishes or that beauty for herself.

Tomorrow Elizabeth will be ill past belief and Ciel will look at her as if she is a dunce for doing this to herself because he doesn't know she knows, and she will smile (smiling with bouncy blonde hair look at my dimples sparkle look at my arms my milky white arms and kissable wrists because they're wrapped around my neck the neck of a wine bottle more please more) and tell him some lie about wanting to try the wine and getting carried away and he will scoff and forget and she will forever act ignorant and like a perfect wife, but tonight she is bedless and can mourn one last time and she has wine and empty rooms to talk to and her love for Ciel, fragile beautiful thing, bird with wings clipped locked in a cat's mouth, and anyways isn't this her dream?

* * *

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes."  
-J.D. Salinger

"Besides, it wasn't just love that held people together. There were secrets, and the price you paid to keep them."  
-Stephan King

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Reviews are love! Tell me what you thought? It's my first Kuroshitsuji piece.


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